And the flood of new ideas and perspectives coming out of post-Soviet Russia profoundly challenged the old certainties about matters from Stalinism to the role of the Soviet press. In academia, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, more complex and nuanced views of Soviet history and politics increasingly flourished. After I spent a few years at the CIA in my 20s, therapy in my 30s started to loosen the grip of rigid thinking. Terms such as “developing countries” and “low and lower-middle-income countries” are now often used in its place.I eventually came to reckon with how simplistic my views on the “evil empire” were. Since it’s partially a relic of the Cold War, many modern academics consider the “Third World” label to be outdated. “Third World” remains the most common of the original designations, but its meaning has changed from “non-aligned” and become more of a blanket term for the developing world. Today, the powerful economies of the West are still sometimes described as “First World,” but the term “Second World” has become largely obsolete following the collapse of the Soviet Union. These were often impoverished former European colonies, and included nearly all the nations of Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and Asia. The Third World, meanwhile, encompassed all the other countries that were not actively aligned with either side in the Cold War. The Second World consisted of the communist Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites. The origins of the concept are complex, but historians usually credit it to the French demographer Alfred Sauvy, who coined the term “Third World” in a 1952 article entitled “Three Worlds, One Planet.” In this original context, the First World included the United States and its capitalist allies in places such as Western Europe, Japan and Australia. The “three worlds” model of geopolitics first arose in the mid-20th century as a way of mapping the various players in the Cold War. By contrast, wealthier countries such as the United States and the nations of Western Europe are described as being part of the “First World.” Where did these distinctions come from, and why do we rarely hear about the “Second World?” People often use the term “Third World” as shorthand for poor or developing nations.
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